Those Wild Wyndhams (42 page)

Percy is dapper as ever in these portraits, but his health was slipping. He complained to Webb of ‘various distressing infirmities’.
¹⁹
He was consumed by anxiety at the direction of the country, his class’s apparently firm foundations turning to quicksand before his eyes. Had he known of the ‘secret understanding’ which George V ‘reluctantly’ gave Asquith in November, Percy would have been more splenetic still. In November, Asquith informed the King that, no cross-party resolution having been reached, the only solution was Parliament’s dissolution, and an election fought on the question. He asked George V for a guarantee that if his government should win that election, then the King would use his prerogative ‘to make Peers if asked for’. Without that guarantee, Asquith told him, he and his entire Cabinet would resign at once.

Faced with this ultimatum, George V sought the advice of his secretary Knollys. Knollys had told Edward VII of Balfour’s offer of that spring, but he had concealed it from his successor, fearing, presumably, that the novice King might seek to take up Balfour’s offer. Now Knollys assured his monarch (with no evidence that this was the case) that Balfour would decline to form a government; and that George V’s only option was to give Asquith the guarantee. He told George V that this was the advice he would have given Edward VII, who would have taken it. Pressed by Asquith, deceived by Knollys, the King reluctantly assented. ‘I disliked having to do this very much, but agreed that this was the only alternative to the Cabinet resigning, which at this moment would be disastrous,’ he explained to his diary on 16 November 1910.
²⁰

The campaign itself was muted. Lloyd George did his best to keep the fires of class enmity burning, revisiting Limehouse to liken the aristocracy to cheese (‘the older it is the higher it becomes’). At the Albert Hall, Balfour appeared to move slightly from the fence on tariff reform by announcing that he had no ‘objection’ to putting the matter to a referendum – immediately alienating tariff reformers, furious that he would not adopt it outright.
²¹
By and large apathy reigned. Candidates rehashed speeches made just a few months before. Poor weather kept people indoors. One-sixth of the men who had voted in January – over a million in all – declined to do so in December. The results, after a year of haggling, debating and gambling, were near identical. The Unionists had lost one seat, the Liberals three, and the Irish Nationalists and Labour Party each gained two. As Christmas approached, Percy wrote to Mary in anticipation of his daughter’s visit to Clouds: ‘Arthur is very welcome here especially if accompanied by yourself. The door is closed to Socialists, Fabians or other and I cannot say Radicals are welcome unless near connections by marriage,’ he added meaningfully.
²²

On Monday 13 March 1911, Percy died in his bedroom at Clouds. He had been declining for days. His wife and four of his five children were with him, only Guy, summoned by telegram back from St Petersburg where he was military attaché, did not arrive in time. Percy’s children agreed that their father was ‘absolutely himself to the very end … his mind clear as crystal’.
¹
He was ‘ready for either alternative. He did not surrender weakly but neither did he struggle to live,’ said George.
²
His friends were saddened, but not surprised. His frailty had been apparent at his last social appearance, Ego Charteris’s wedding to Letty Manners the month before.

Percy, whose religious faith had wavered ever since he had read Darwin as a young man, appeared to have had some sort of deathbed enlightenment. ‘“God”
revealed
himself to Percy & gave him such a vision OF LOVE & HAPPINESS & glory that I can never forget it,’ Madeline Wyndham told Wilfrid Blunt.
³
Her ardent polyglot faith gave her comfort. ‘[T]he feeling that He
has left us
,
never makes me
unhappy
, not half as unhappy as seeing Him suffering &
miserable Here
– that was
wretchedness
,’ she told Mary, some six months later from Clouds as she passed her first birthday for fifty years without her husband on ‘a Heavenly day almost too Hot with a Peacock with head turned up to heaven piercing the air with his Cries’.
⁴

Percy’s body was cremated at Woking. His ashes, in an oak casket made from trees grown on the estate, were buried after a funeral held at East Knoyle church on Saturday 18 March,
⁵
and marked by a green sandstone cross.
⁶
Percy’s obituaries mourned the passing of a man who was the last of an age: the independent-minded aristocrat dutifully undertaking the responsibility of paternalistic rule.
⁷
Pamela immediately placed an order with the milliners Maison St Louis in Halkin Street for a black straw quatre corn with chiffon veil, a coarse black straw and feather toque with veil, a widow’s hat with crêpe veil, two chiffon hats, a black tagel picture hat with grey feather mount, a mercury in black straw-lined velvet with velvet trimming, and a grey straw with velvet lining and grey wing – £26 16s 6d in total.
⁸

Percy’s estate was valued at £241,162 gross.
⁹
He left Madeline Wyndham a lifetime interest in 44 Belgrave Square, his household effects and her jewellery, all to revert to George on her death. She received absolutely a lump sum of £1,000 and an annuity of £3,100 and his horses, carriages, personal effects and ‘consumable stores’. Guy received £5,000 and a further annuity of £850 during his mother’s lifetime. Percy’s daughters received nothing – nor did Dorothy Carleton (on whom he had intended to settle £300) – for all, so he wrote in his will, were sufficiently provided for by settlement. The governess Bun received £100, so did Percy’s agent Edward Miles. Various other members of staff received small bequests. Everything else went to George.
¹⁰
Increasingly, Madeline Wyndham divided her time between Clouds, Stanway, Babraham and Wilsford, a shawl-clad, mob-capped expansive figure, beloved of her grandchildren, known to them as ‘Gan-Gan’.

George turned his substantial energy towards making his own mark upon Clouds. He arranged for electricity to be installed, and commissioned Detmar Blow to turn the old nursery into a large library for himself. The now redundant lamp room was made into a chapel for Sibell, panelled in old Italian dark wood with a red-brick floor and an arching whitewashed ceiling overhead.
¹¹
George assumed with relish, and a certain humility, the role of squire for which he had been preparing all his life: ‘All the work I have to do here only increases – if that were possible – my deep respect for his [Percy’s] definite character and my admiration of his justice and generosity,’ he wrote to a friend.
¹²
For the present, his full energies were focused on securing the future of his class.

For almost two decades the Souls had managed to separate politics from friendship. In 1900, Arthur had written to Mary recounting a heated ‘passage of arms’ with Asquith in the Commons over Irish landlords which took place directly after Arthur had dined with the Asquiths: ‘Asquith was the challenger, but I felt a mild awkwardness replying to a man in the strength of his own champagne!’
¹³
Now the situation was forcing underhand behaviour. In January 1911, Arthur dined with Lord Knollys and fell into the trap of giving him his views on the constitutional position and the creation of peers, not knowing either of the secret guarantee or that the dinner was approved by Asquith, to whom Knollys was reporting back. At the same time, Margot, who almost certainly had some idea of the guarantee, was leading Mary astray. Visiting her at Gosford, she came to her room for a talk after tea. While claiming to know no real details, she urged magnanimity from the Unionists with regard to the Parliament Bill about to be put before the Commons. As Mary wrote to Arthur:

She was practically making a great appeal to ‘trust Henry’ … I said but supposing we are disposed to trust Henry and accept the veto bill as the best way out, trusting to amendments and Henry’s conscience or moderation, how can we tell that Henry would not be pushed much further than he wanted to go … She said Henry’s not a bit afraid of his own party. She is horrified at the idea of having to create peers.
¹⁴

The Parliament Bill had its first reading in the Commons on 22 February. During three readings over three months, 900 amendments were tabled – almost all from the Opposition – only the most minor of which succeeded. All knew that the real action was to come in the Lords, where a tribe of backwoods peers, who had never hitherto troubled the Upper House with their presence, were mustering under the leadership of Lord Willoughby de Broke, given encouragement by more senior figures, including George Wyndham, Curzon and Lord Lansdowne, the Leader in the Lords. It was shaping up to be a sweltering summer. George V’s coronation, held on 22 June, was one of the few cool, cloudy days of the Season. Whenever he could, Balfour adopted flannels and straw hats;
¹⁵
after work, Edward Grey and Winston Churchill splashed about in the marbled swimming baths at the Automobile Club on Pall Mall.
¹⁶
At a fancy-dress ball at Claridge’s given by Lord Winterton and the rising Unionist star F. E. Smith on 24 May, to general merriment Waldorf Astor, son of William Astor and a Unionist MP, appeared clad in a peer’s robes of state and a tinsel coronet on which was balanced a placard: ‘499’ read one side; ‘still one more vacancy’ read the other. Both Asquith and Balfour were present.
¹⁷

It was no laughing matter when the Lords massacred the Parliament Bill with amendments in July, and the news of the King’s secret guarantee was finally leaked. It was a ‘shocking scandal’, Arthur said to Mary. ‘I expect an anxious, but not a laborious week …’
¹⁸
In fact, he was furious at Asquith’s and Knollys’s underhand behaviour in securing and concealing the guarantee. For more rational Unionists, the guarantee’s existence made it impossible to continue to obstruct the Bill, since a House flooded with Liberal peers would destroy any remaining Unionist power in the Lords. Yet when on 21 July Balfour called his Shadow Cabinet to Carlton Gardens to vote on what course the peers should take, there was no agreement: ‘indeed most violent differences’, he told Mary.
¹⁹
Standing against the ‘Hedgers’, like Arthur, who recommended capitulation, were ‘Ditchers’, like George, in a phrase of his own coining, determined ‘to die in the last ditch’ defending the Lords.
²⁰

For the first time in their long friendship, Arthur and George were on opposing sides, although that is to misrepresent their relative positions somewhat. George was zealous, and Arthur expressed almost no position at all. Privately Arthur thought resistance would only ‘advertise … the fact that we are the victims of a revolution. Their policy may be a wise one, but there is nothing heroic about it.’
²¹
Publicly, he said only that he would stand and fall by Lord Lansdowne.
²²
Lansdowne, the most reluctant of ‘Hedgers’, only advocated but did not demand from his peers the capitulation that privately he too found ‘unpalatable’.
²³
Passivity had settled like a blanket over the party leadership. The Ditchers were in full revolt.

The Commons was scheduled to address the Lords’ wrecking amendments on 24 July. It was confounded by the ‘Cecil Scene’, as Asquith, rising to speak, was drowned out by a full half-hour of cat-calls, jeers and howls of ‘Traitor’, ‘Who killed the King’, ‘Let Redmond speak’ (an allusion to the fact that the Lords was considered the last bastion against Home Rule) and, more obliquely, ‘American Dollars’. Eventually, without uttering a word, Asquith sat down. When Balfour rose, the Chamber fell embarrassingly silent. Nothing comparable to this had been seen since MPs brawled on the floor of the Commons over Home Rule in 1893, but that had been born out of momentary passion. This was a plot organized by Balfour’s Cecil relations: ‘as usual the leading lunatics are my own kith and kin,’ he admitted to Mary wearily.
²⁴

By tacit agreement, neither Mary nor Arthur mentioned George’s part in events. The next day, Wilfrid Blunt stopped in at Belgrave Square to find George, F. E. Smith and George’s stepson Bend’Or Westminster ebullient at the Cecil Scene’s success and planning their next line of attack. ‘Here you see the conspirators,’ cried George as his cousin poked his head round the door. ‘They are all in the highest possible spirits at the commotion they have caused and consider they have forced Balfour’s hand,’ Wilfrid recorded in his diary; ‘… they are going to give a banquet to old Halsbury … as the saviour of the Constitution.’
²⁵

The ‘Halsbury Banquet’ – in honour of the eighty-seven-year-old Lord Halsbury, the Diehards’ designated figurehead – took place at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand two days later. Tickets were advertised by a circular issued from the Carlton Club and signed by George, Edward Carson, Austen Chamberlain and F. E. Smith.
²⁶
Spirits among the 600-strong crowd ran dangerously high. ‘They [the Government] have been playing, and they are playing a game of gigantic bluff …’ declared Austen Chamberlain. It is hard not to see George’s hand in the hastily devised plan at the evening’s end for the banqueters to draw Halsbury in triumph from the Strand to his house in Ennismore Gardens. Halsbury’s family stymied the plan, fearing the octogenarian might expire from the excitement.
²⁷